Charles Murray on LBJ's war on poverty

In 1968, as Lyndon Johnson left office, 13% of Americans were poor, using the official definition. Over the next twelve years, our expenditures on social welfare quadrupled. And, in 1980, the percentage of poor Americans was - 13%. Can it be that nothing had changed?

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The basic story we shall unravel comes down to this: Basic indicators of well-being took a turn for the worse in the 1960s, most consistently and most dramatically for the poor. In some cases, earliers progress slowed' in other cases mild deterioration accelerated; in a few instances advance turned into retreat. The trendlines on many of the indicators are - literally - unbelievable to people who do not make a profession of following them.

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A government's social policy helps set the rules of the game... The most compelling explanation for the marked shift in the fortunes of the poor is that they continued to respond, as they always had, to the world as they found it, but that we - meaning the not-poor and un-disadvantaged - had changed the rules of their world. Not of our world, just of theirs. The first effect of the new rules was to make it profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that were destructive in the long term. Their second effect was to mask these long-term losses - to subsidize irretrievable mistakes. We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty, and inadvertently built a trap.

~ Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy: 1950-1980, pp. 8-9